7 Reasons why your Magento Site needs a Progressive Web App

What is a Progressive Web App?

Native apps were the first way in which merchants delivered a superior online shopping experience to their users. The Guardian says, in 2016, mobile web overtook desktop traffic for the first time ever, making premium shopping experiences on the mobile web absolutely necessary for the store owners to survive.

The problem, however, is that mobile apps are very expensive to build and maintain. Also, the consumers prefer to only download and use apps from known brands with which they need regular interactions.

The invention of Progressive Web Apps (PWA), pioneered by Google, solves this huge problem. PWAs promise to deliver a new, hybrid web and app experience, which delivers the premium “app-like” experience that shoppers love, to everyone who visits your website without downloading and installing an app from the App Store, Play Store or App marketplace.

With Progressive Web Apps from Team MageCube, you get some astounding features like push notifications, offline mode and faster page loading. The PWA progressively loads and runs in a web browser and effectively blur the lines between native apps and the mobile browser by bringing almost all the advantages of native mobile apps to the users mobile browser. Also, your PWA launches and works exactly like a native app. This improved performance also gets your site a healthy SEO boost in search engine rankings.

Why do I need to make my Magento Site a PWA?

1. Mobile: Today’s Critical Point of Contact:

Today, mobile is the most strategic touch-point for reaching your customers. Your audience is gradually shifting to mobile web and you must keep up with them by making the most of this new technology and updating your Magento 2 website to PWA to reap benefits. Right now, the features that come with Progressive Web Apps and a customer engagement platform are the most effective revenue drivers on mobile.

2. Faster Browsing:

PWAs are much faster to interact and the pages load instantly and reliably irrespective of the network connection your user is on. The technique involved here is Runtime Caching with Service Worker, which reduces the time involved to load pages and resources and as a result, user will see content in a few milliseconds.

3. Web Push Notifications:

An exciting proposition for merchants is that PWAs support push notifications in the browser, extending the opportunity for marketers to send real-time, contextual and personalized messages to their customers and keep them informed about the latest promotional offers, new products, etc.

4. Works in offline mode:

PWAs will work even when there is no or poor internet connectivity. Though the user will not be able to load any new content, this will work for the pages which have been previously visited by the user. Therefore your customers can still continue browsing your store as long as they have visited the pages.

5. Prompts the user to add to home screen:

When a user visits your website for the first time it will prompt them to create a shortcut of the PWA on their home screen in just one click, similar to installing an app and getting an icon for easy access. And once the PWA has been added to the home screen it will launch and work exactly like a native app. By this way, it also saves time and effort to promote the app to all of your customers.

6. SEO Friendly:

PWAs are not like conventional sites as the pages progressively adapt as the user navigates and performs actions. Luckily all the major search engines have mechanism of crawling the JavaScript of a PWA site just as they would do on a conventional responsive site. The key is maintaining good SEO practices such as using canonical URLs and maintaining a crawl-able sitemap.

7. Easy on your pocket:

The major advantage that Progressive Web Apps have over Native Apps is that they take you less time, money and effort to build. You do not need to pay the App Store fees or get your apps approved. The app goes live instantly. Also, your customer need not visit any download centers to search and download a Progressive Web App as it’s with the native apps.

Conclusion

Many experts predict that in the near future Progressive Web Apps (PWA) will replace the Native Apps. This idea is surely gaining momentum and individuals & companies that have made use of PWA are very happy with the results.